Related papers: Influential News and Policy-making
The proliferation of misinformation on social media has concerning possible consequences, such as the degradation of democratic norms. While recent research on countering misinformation has largely focused on analyzing the effectiveness of…
Information is a critical dimension in warfare. Inaccurate information such as misinformation or disinformation further complicates military operations. In this paper, we examine the value of misinformation and disinformation to a military…
An increasing number of politicians are relying on cheaper, easier to access technologies such as online social media platforms to communicate with their constituency. These platforms present a cheap and low-barrier channel of communication…
In recent studies of political decision-making, apparently anomalous behavior has been observed on the part of voters, in which negative information about a candidate strengthens, rather than weakens, a prior positive opinion about the…
This paper studies a communication game between an uninformed decision maker and two perfectly informed senders with conflicting interests. Senders can misreport information at a cost that increases with the size of the misrepresentation.…
Interacting agents receive public information at no cost and flexibly acquire private information at a cost proportional to entropy reduction. When a policymaker provides more public information, agents acquire less private information,…
Analyses of voting algorithms often overlook informational externalities shaping individual votes. For example, pre-polling information often skews voters towards candidates who may not be their top choice, but who they believe would be a…
We study voluntary disclosure with multiple biased senders who may bear costs for disclosing or concealing their private information. Under relevant assumptions, disclosures are strategic substitutes under a disclosure cost but complements…
We study how coordinated disinformation campaigns affect elections. We develop a constrained information design model in which a sender deploys uninformative messages that mimic voters' exogenous informative signals. Voters initially…
This paper presents the research of the influence of cognitive, behavioral, representational factors on the susceptibility of the participants in social networks to misinformation, as well as on the activity of the nodes in this regard. The…
Previous work suggests that people's preference for different kinds of information depends on more than just accuracy. This could happen because the messages contained within different pieces of information may either be well-liked or…
The increasing cost of electoral campaigns raises the need for effective campaign planning and a precise understanding of the return of such investment. Interestingly, despite the strong impact of elections on our daily lives, how this…
We develop a model of social media in which users produce different types of content and choose whom to follow. Even when abstracting from algorithmic bias, linking costs shape networks and polarization. In the welfare-maximizing…
The emergent behavior of a distributed system is conditioned by the information available to the local decision-makers. Therefore, one may expect that providing decision-makers with more information will improve system performance; in this…
This paper models voters who invest effort to determine whether a particular claim relevant to their voting choices is correct. If a voter succeeds in determining whether the claim is correct, this information is shared via a social…
As AI-enabled systems become available for political campaign outreach, an important question has received little empirical attention: how do people evaluate the communicative practices these systems represent, and what consequences do…
Misinformation is a challenging problem. This paper provides the first systematic interdisciplinary investigation of technical and non-technical interventions against misinformation. It combines interviews and a survey to understand which…
A great deal of empirical research has examined who falls for misinformation and why. Here, we introduce a formal game-theoretic model of engagement with news stories that captures the strategic interplay between (mis)information consumers…
Democratic societies increasingly rely on communication networks to aggregate citizen preferences and information, yet these same networks can systematically mislead voters under certain conditions. We introduce an agent-based model that…
News feeds in virtually all social media platforms include engagement metrics, such as the number of times each post is liked and shared. We find that exposure to these social engagement signals increases the vulnerability of users to…